Egress
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Egress is data leaving the cloud — going OUT. Cloud providers charge for egress (data going from their servers to the internet or other providers) but not for ingress. This is how AWS can lure you in with cheap inbound prices and then quietly charge you a fortune to get your own data back out.
Real Talk
Egress refers to outbound data transfer from a cloud provider's network to the public internet or other networks. Cloud providers charge for egress traffic (typically $0.08-0.09/GB for AWS) while ingress is free. Egress fees become a significant cost at scale and create vendor lock-in by making data migration expensive.
When You'll Hear This
"The egress bill from S3 is huge — we're serving images directly instead of through CloudFront." / "Check your egress costs before migrating to another cloud."
Related Terms
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is how wide your internet pipe is — how much data can flow through per second. A narrow pipe means slow speeds, a wide pipe means fast speeds.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a network of servers spread around the world that store copies of your files.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing means using computers that live in someone else's giant warehouse instead of your own machine.
Ingress
Ingress is data coming INTO the cloud from outside — the opposite of egress.
Object Storage
Object storage treats files as 'objects' — each one gets a unique key (like a URL) and is stored with its data and metadata.
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is Amazon's giant file locker in the sky.